Just like
anything else, with certain advances there are certain
limitations and drawbacks.

Laptop Limitation.
Dynamic disks are not supported on laptops,
removable disks (such as Jaz or ORB drives), detachable
disks that use Universal Serial Bus (USB) or IEEE 1394
(FireWire) interfaces, or on drives connected to a shared
SCSI bus. On laptops you do not even see the
option to convert basic disks to dynamic within the Disk
Management tool.

Multi-boot
considerations. Dynamic volumes cannot be accessed by
MS-DOS,
Windows 95,
Windows 98,
Windows Millennium Edition,
Windows NT 4.0, or
Windows XP Home Edition operating systems
that are dual-booted with
Windows XP Professional. If you want
computers running these operating systems to be able to
access the data, you need to store the data on basic
volumes.

Extending Volumes.
When basic volumes are converted to dynamic they may or
may not have an entry in the partition table depending on
whether that volume was a system or boot partition. If the
volume that was converted was originally a system or boot
partition it retains its old entry in the partition table.
You can install
Windows XP Professional on that volume;
however, you will be unable to extend it. If the converted
volume was not originally a system or boot volume, it will
not have the old partition table entry. You won't be able
to install
Windows XP Professional on the volume, but
it will be possible to extend it.

Volumes converted from
partitions on
Windows 2000 systems
have an entry in the partition table. On
Windows XP Professional systems, volumes
converted from partitions do not have an entry in the
partition table unless the partitions were originally
system or boot partitions. You can see if a volume has an
entry in the partition table by right-clicking the volume
within the Disk Management tool. If the Extend Volume
option is disabled, the volume has an old entry in the
partition table.

That's a
wrap for this week. Be sure to check back in next week for
the next article in this series.

In
the meantime, best of luck in your
studies and please feel free to contact me with any
questions on my column and remember,

"Absolute anonymity isn't practical, or possible, in real
life or on the internet."